Conan the Barberian: The fantasies and realities behind the movie.

I admit I've never properly fully read the books by Robert E.Howard. However seeing the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian and filming locations, I was able to analyze the themes of the film which were inspired by true events and places.
In the beginning we see Conan's village in a cold forested area where it is raided by the snake cult led by Thulsa Doom.

The scene of the raid and killing of the adults in Conan's village is most likely inspired by the ancient attacks by the Scythians on the Cimmerians.
The characters in the movie, including Conan himself, his friends and his enemies are entirely fictional. But the tribes and ethnic groups they belong to are entirely historical. Conan is clearly a Cimmerian according to the story and characters created by E.Howard. The filming location was somewhere in Germany to depict the Cimmerian homeland. The Cimmerians lived in the northern portions of the Caucasus mountain region which is heavily forested and has cold snowy winters as depicted in the movie.

For the size of an entire ethnic group, the population of the Cimmerians in the movie seemed relatively small. My guess is they were meant to depict just one tribe of Cimmerians and not the entire ethnic group. Just as the Scythian horsemen in Thulsa Doom's army is meant to depict one tribe of Scythians and not the entire race.

After the attacks the children, including Conan are taken as slaves. Conan's wizard friend and film narrator explains the children were taken north. It shows the children led for days in chains to a flat desert plain with rocks and grass. North of the Caucasus region where such a landscape can be seen are the northeastern coasts of the Caspian sea towards the borders of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation.

Also an interesting observation in the movie is that most people have European features. The movie is set in a time period when Central Asia was still inhabited by Caucasian skulled Indo-Europeans prior to the Turko-Mongol migrations which occurred mainly in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

If you look carefully at the slave "owner" in the scene, he could easily be an ancestor of the bearded Pakhtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We see this slave owner selling Conan off to another slave owner with red hair and a beard. According to claims I've read by Turkic people, Kyrgyzstan was once filled with red haired people. This is possible since the Tocharians who lived in the Tarim desert east of Kyrgyzstan in China were said to have been Celtic related red haired people.

After Conan is sold to a new slave owner and becomes a successful gladiator, we hear the narrator saying he was taken to the far east.
In the "far east" of the movie Conan is seen being trained by Han Chinese warriors. The far east in the movie is most likely northwest of China. A strong inaccuracy here was the way the Han Chinese warriors were dressed. I think there is little evidence to suggest the Han Chinese dressed in such fashion in ancient times. Their outfits look more like they were from the first millennium AD.

The rest of the filming locations were taken in southern Italy and Spain. It shows mostly grassland and desert. It even shows scenes of snowfalls in the desert. This is Central Asia, a landmass which is nothing more than grasslands and deserts with dry, cold winters.
We also see Conan befriend Subutai, the unnamed wizard and Valeria, who fits the description of a Sarmatian.

The Sarmatians were often mistaken for the Scythians due to their nomadic lifestyle and common Iranic language. However the main difference between the two was that Sarmatian women were trained to fight unlike Scythian women.
In fact according to historians, Sarmatian women were not accepted for marriage unless they killed a warrior of the enemy tribe.

King Osric, another character from the story is shown. He is most likely another Indo-European tribal leader as his costume depicts:

The rest of the movie shows Conan and his friends situated around a the sea in the middle of the desert. The actual filming location was on a coastal area of the USA but from what I can see in the story it is most likely the coast of the Aral Sea.

A scene also shows Conan journeying for days in pursuit Thulsa Doom that takes him across to a mountainous area which appears to be a depiction of the Altay mountain region.
The only error I can see here is the Altay mountains have more grass and less sand/stones. It is less of a rocky landscape and more of a flat grassland region with rivers which the movie doesn't show.

Amongst the more fictional elements of the movie was the snake worship in Thulsa Doom's cult. Though animal worship was a strong part of Indo-European spiritualities and cultures, it was not restricted to any single animal worship, but a wide range of animals which most likely included snakes.
And as the creators of the movie commented, the snake cult is fictional even though I notice their symbols are derived from actual historic Indo-European cultures such as the sun and the moon.

The other fantasy elements are of course the magical themes and folklore altered to reality within the movie's storyline.
The second movie Conan the Destroyer is less relevant as it is further out of touch with reality and has more fantasy themes and plot-lines more so than the first film.

The geographic settings in the second film are the only realistic elements which depict the semi-forests and grasslands. This is because the story was set more towards Europe than desert/grassland covered Central Asia.

I usually don't discuss movies in my anthropology blog nor intend to in the future unless they're historical or inspired by history. But Conan the Barbarian is accurate for it's historical depictions of Central Asia and the Indo-European nomads who lived there prior to the Turko-Mongol migrations.

I recommend this movie to anyone who seeks a physical depiction of ancient Indo-European peoples of Central Asia on video and what the region looked like demographically in ancient times.

Post update: This trivia contains more possible inspirations to the movie.